In the first of a series scrutinising Enfield Council’s progress on meeting climate targets, Matt Burn from Enfield Climate Action Forum’s land use working group looks at the borough’s heat network project

Roadworks in Hertford Road to install the Energetik heat network

Enfield Council has a crucial role to play in responding to the climate emergency, particularly in cutting emissions from heating, transport and waste.

The council declared a climate emergency in 2019 and adopted its first Enfield Climate Action Plan in 2020. But five years on, scrutiny by community groups shows the council is falling far short of its targets.

One of the starkest examples concerns Energetik, the council-owned district heating network. District heating is central to the council’s decarbonisation strategy, as it replaces individual gas boilers with lower-carbon communal energy.

In June 2024, the updated Enfield Climate Action Plan set ambitious targets for Energetik: 36,000 homes connected by 2030, rising to nearly 78,800 by 2040.

Yet, less than a year later, in June 2025, the council’s cabinet approved Energetik’s revised business plan with dramatically lower figures: just 5,600 homes connected by 2030 and 15,600 by 2040. That’s a shortfall of over 30,000 homes by 2030 and more than 63,000 by 2040 compared with the Enfield Climate Action Plan.

The mismatch is not just a matter of numbers. If the business plan figures are correct – and they must be, since they underpin the company’s financial and operational planning – then the Enfield Climate Action Plan 2024 rests on fundamentally unrealistic assumptions. This undermines the credibility of the council’s roadmap to carbon neutrality.

It also raises questions about governance and scrutiny. How could cabinet members, including the portfolio holder for environment, sign off on two contradictory plans in the space of a year without reconciling them or highlighting the inconsistency in public reports?

This matters. Heating is one of the borough’s largest sources of carbon emissions, and switching away from individual gas boilers is essential if Enfield is to meet its climate goals.

If flagship schemes like Energetik fail to deliver at scale, the gap must be filled by alternative policies – but the council has set out no clear plan B. Residents have a right to expect transparency and realism from their local authority on an issue as serious as climate change, not gloss over uncomfortable truths.

Enfield Council has rightly called climate change an “existential threat to life on earth”. To live up to that rhetoric, it must ensure its targets are deliverable, update them when assumptions change, and communicate openly about progress.

Without this, Enfield Climate Action Plan risks looking more like public relations than a serious pathway to a low-carbon future.

This article is the first in a short series by EnCaf’s land use working group examining Enfield Council’s progress towards its Climate Action Plan targets. Future pieces will look at waste and recycling, and at transport.

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